The Trinidad Guardian Newspaper - Jonathan Alihttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/byline-authors/jonathan-ali
enReality and T bites for jointpophttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2015-04-05/reality-and-t-bites-jointpop
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Dion%20Camacho.jpg" width="400" height="401" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>T&amp;T rock and roll band jointpop are back with their sixth full-length album, Quicksand.</p>
<p>For this effort, the group—singer, songwriter and guitarist Gary Hector, lead guitarist Damon Homer, bassist Jerome Girdharrie, keyboard player Phil Hill and drummer Dion Camacho—recruited Paul Kimble, formerly of US indie-rock band Grant Lee Buffalo, to be producer.</p>
<p>The album of 11 original songs (plus the lagniappe of a cover of London’s Burning by the Clash, appropriately rechristened Trinidad’s Burning) was written in a house at Point Radix in Mayaro, which is also where it was later recorded, over a two-week period. </p>
<p>Recently jointpop converged at “Gabby Road”—as Camacho’s wife Gabrielle’s office, which doubles as a music-recording space, is wittily known—to discuss the creation of Quicksand while simultaneously listening to the album. Paul Kimble Skyped in his salty, tongue-in-cheek contributions from his base in Seattle, Washington.</p>
<p>The genesis of Quicksand</p>
<p>Hector: For us, deciding to make another album is always deciding if we’re going to continue as a band: “You cool? You in? You good? Well then okay, let’s write an album.”</p>
<p>Camacho: Yes, let’s write an album, but let’s write a feel-good album this time. Let’s not complain about not being able to get out of Trinidad and make it “out there.” So it’s more about getting out of the quicksand than being stuck in it.</p>
<p>Kimble: Gary contacted me via the Internet and I thought he was pretty weird, but he offered me money and so I said, “Sure, I’ll come produce your band.” Nothing went wrong the entire time we were recording, which is unusual. It was a hell of a lot of fun. If you don’t feel happy after you listen to this album, you’re a robot.</p>
<p>Simply Beautiful</p>
<p>The album’s first single, Simply Beautiful (bit.ly/1DwqOgn), with its arresting piano riff and rip-roaring guitar solo, catalogues a series of personal shortcomings—to a fed-up lover? To bandmates at the end of their tether?—before the plaintive declaration: “You’re simply beautiful.”</p>
<p>Hector: Phil listened to the Queen Live DVD before we recorded this.</p>
<p>Kimble: This song kicks a––. Just listen to the drums and bass and guitar. The groove is just perfect. </p>
<p>Homer: I think this song was the easiest for us to write, as it was so familiar to us—to me, at least, as I’ve been in the band for so long. This song follows a thread that we’ve been on for the last 19 years. It could be on any of our albums.</p>
<p>Down to Me</p>
<p>Sung over a disarmingly sweet acoustic guitar, Down to Me sees Hector make a prodigal’s return to overt social commentary. The song’s a laundry list of things that pointedly fail to impress him: “learjets and all-inclusive fetes;” “Miss World and sex-tape girls;” “sinister ministers;” and “PNM, UNC, ILP and PPP,” all get short shrift because, in perhaps the album’s single best lyric, “That thing they selling/ I get it for free.”</p>
<p>Jonathan Ali: This is the most direct you’ve been in a song about your feelings about Trinidad in a long time.</p>
<p>Hector: Yeah. It came from the fact that this is one of the first records we’ve made that didn’t follow an overseas tour. We were here, and I was feeling I had something to say. So I didn’t shy away from getting involved in the lyric. </p>
<p>Ali: Everyone knows that we don’t have a PPP, right? </p>
<p>Camacho: Yeah. We discussed it and Gary was like, “Perfect. It now globalises the whole thing. There’s a PPP somewhere.”</p>
<p>Quicksand</p>
<p>Fittingly, no song on Quicksand embodies the band’s insistence on the album’s upbeat vibe than the title track: hand-clapping, foot-stomping, pure rock-and-roll goodness. There’ll be a broad smile on your face even as you sing the worrying refrain: “Do you know that sinking feeling?”</p>
<p>Phil Hill: There’s a dance to go with this song—the “Quicksand” dance. A jitterbug.</p>
<p>Ali: It does have a Cab Calloway feel to it.</p>
<p>Hector: My daughter bought me a book on American Indian tribes. I read a lot on the subject. And the introduction, the first paragraph, had the word quicksand in it, and I had this conviction: “F--- it, that’s the album title.” Not only is the band in quicksand, the country is also, as you hear in the third refrain: “This land, we’re in quicksand.” </p>
<p>Camacho: But we stayed with the whole positive thrust of getting out of the quicksand.</p>
<p>Hector: Actually, part of the quicksand myth is that there’s nothing called quicksand. When last you hear about quicksand? It was only used for Western movies. It was a thing of the 60s.</p>
<p>Reality and T</p>
<p>Reality and T is a boisterous and punkified sea chantey, an urgent, ramshackle state-of-the-nation snapshot and slap upside the head that captures the country in all its excessive, paradoxical, exasperating madness. “Who’s fooling who? Who’s gonna love you, tomorrow?” Hector bawls on the refrain, a sobering warning for the political silly season now underway.</p>
<p>Hill: The crazy piano was Paul’s idea.</p>
<p>Ali: You mean the Jerry Lee Lewis piano solo?</p>
<p>Hill: Yeah, the mad, Liberace-on-crack vibe. It was four o’ clock in the morning. Paul said, “You’re a virtuoso, you know what you’re doing.”</p>
<p>Camacho: When I first heard the solo I thought it would be edited out of the song. Now I can’t picture the song without it.</p>
<p>Hill: Paul then said, “I’m hearing this ‘thing’ for the end of this song, so let’s drink.” He got everybody drunk and set up a room microphone and was like, “Sing the chorus to the song.”</p>
<p>Kimble: It’s the entire band singing at once, which I think really adds something to the song, because it’s that kind of “we’re all in this together, it’s us against the world, kicking against the p----s” kind of sentiment. And the spirit of that chorus is exactly what it should be—just trying to survive in the face of overwhelming odds.</p>
<p>Hector: The lyrics came out of a January writing session—Old Year’s, fireworks, the dogs. Then again, we were liming here one night and it came up: “We’re living in reality and T!” But the concept is cool; it works for anything. </p>
<p>We’re actually copying American reality TV on our local TV. We’re getting carried away with the whole thing. We had the whole island life; we had that to sell to the world. We decide to buy something else and use that as the reality, as the real thing.</p>
<p>Camacho: But the real thing here is also imitating the whole gangsta thing, the drug thing.</p>
<p>Hector: It’s like the reverse side of the tourist brochure—the nice sunsets and Maracas beach, let we wine down in the road and have a good time. Nobody’s addressing the other side of the brochure. And then we’re all shocked when we end up on the list of countries with the highest murder rates. Trip Advisor warnings and so on. Nobody’s revealing that side of it. </p>
<p>Camacho: But you’re not going to change things. </p>
<p>Hector: I know, but have a say. Say some f---ing thing. Somebody have to reverse the brochure a little bit. Somebody have to say something.</p>
<p><strong>MORE INFO</strong></p>
<p>Quicksand is out on iTunes, Amazon.com and CD Baby. There’s also a limited-edition CD—check jointpop’s Facebook [<a href="http://www.facebook.com/jointpop]">www.facebook.com/jointpop]</a> page to find out how to purchase a copy. See the Facebook page, too, for details of their next performance, which will be at the Big Black Box on Murray Street in Woodbrook on May 16. Cowboy hats are optional.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 05 Apr 2015 05:02:49 +0000alexk101038 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttJonathan AliImpossible is somethinghttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2013-01-27/impossible-something
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/Movie.png" width="400" height="244" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>The Impossible<br />
Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona<br />
Starring Ewan McGregor,<br />
Naomi Watts, Tom Holland</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>The Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004, is one of those events about which everyone can recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. (I happened to be visiting the United States at the time, and woke up to it on television on a wintry Boxing Day.) Over 230,000 people in South-East Asia died in a tragedy of such magnitude that it was almost beyond belief: how could so many lose their lives in mere moments?</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Impossible, a finely-wrought drama based on actual events, doesn’t seek to answer this question, nor does it attempt to take on the vast scope of the tsunami across the many countries it ravaged. Instead the movie portrays one family’s ordeal on that horrific day and immediately afterwards, locating a remarkable and moving story of separation and survival within a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. If you have small children, you will probably hug them a little tighter after seeing this film.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
At the centre of the movie are the Bennetts, a young family, British and blonde, on holiday at a beach resort in Thailand. The father, Henry (Ewan McGregor, who has finally graduated to playing paterfamiliases), works for a multinational corporation in Japan; his wife Maria (Naomi Watts) is a doctor whose decision to put her career on hold to raise their three boys is one signifier of the family’s relative wealth. There is some talk at the outset of Maria going back to work, an idea Henry doesn’t seem to care much for.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
There isn’t any lingering over character development or setting up of the action. After a few obligatory scenes of frolicking on the white-sand beach and snorkelling on the colourful reef, the tsunami hits, and the Bennetts are unceremoniously scattered by the great tide of water rushing inland. These are absolutely gripping scenes, fluidly handled, going from expansive overhead shots to ground-level shots to underwater close-ups seamlessly. The special effects look great—that is to say, realistic.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
At this point the movie follows the fortunes of Maria, who manages to stay together with Lucas, her eldest son (Tom Holland). My goodness, but does Maria suffer. Her body is tossed about, her flesh is ripped, at one point she throws up some horrible black stuff—and yet she somehow keeps going. With all the award ceremonies taking place it’s a scandal that Watts hasn’t gained any significant recognition for her role. If only for sheer physical endurance she deserves a gong.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
Yet while Maria suffers, her son shines. For a considerable stretch of the film’s action young Tom Holland gamely dominates the screen, as Lucas helps lead his mother first to safety and then to hospital, where, at her insistence, he makes himself useful helping reunite separated families. Meanwhile Henry, who has managed to hold on to the two other boys, is desperately searching for his wife and eldest son. I won’t give away the ending, not that there’s anything to give away: the film’s title, for a start, fairly ensures that.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
One word I’ve refrained from employing in this review is “miraculous.” This is not out of any personal reluctance to categorise the astonishing chain of events—based on a true story, remember—portrayed in the film as an act of God. It is the film itself that staunchly refrains from indulging in the spiritual. Apart from one scene where the youngest Bennett boy, Thomas (Samuel Joslin), has a conversation with an elderly woman (a cameo by the great Geraldine Chaplin) that can only be described as cosmic, no prayers are said, no deity is invoked in The Impossible. Compare this with Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, a complete fiction, in which Pi attributes his unlikely survival to divine will.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
The Impossible has been criticised for telling the story of a white western family, when most of the tsunami victims were not. The facts reflect movie-industry reality. Typically, the bigger a film’s budget, the more famous (for which read bankable) its actors have to be. This film is based on the true story of a Spanish family, and the film is a Spanish production—that is, most of its key crew and funding are from Spain. The lead roles were originally to be filled by Spanish actors, but given the considerable money involved, the decision was made to cast two Hollywood A-list stars instead. The business of film being what it is, any alternative would have been, simply, impossible.</p>
</div></div></div>Sun, 27 Jan 2013 14:44:29 +0000Black_Jacobin59277 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttJonathan AliA dish best served with swagg and stylehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2013-01-12/dish-best-served-swagg-and-style
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/django.png" width="400" height="228" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong>(Spoiler alert) Review contains spoilers.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Can a movie about slavery be entertaining? According to Django Unchained, the answer is enthusiastically, overwhelmingly yes. The latest cinematic firebomb from the febrile mind of Quentin Tarantino, Django Unchained is—for the most part—a highly exciting, irreverent and funny monument to political incorrectness and historical inaccuracy, a stylish, Western-blaxploitation revenge fantasy splattered with blood and possessing cocksure swagger to spare. Alex Haley’s Roots this isn’t.</p>
<p>
Set in the American South just before the Civil War, it tells the story of a slave, Django (Jamie Foxx), who is freed by a German bounty hunter posing as an itinerant dentist, Dr King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), and who, in return for assistance in capturing some outlaws, will help Django rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). A lot of deadly violence is perpetrated against white males along the way, in this insolent and anachronistic upending of history as we know it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>That’s only part of the equation, however. As with Pulp Fiction (still his best film) and indeed all of Tarantino’s work, Django Unchained is a movie about the movies, and it celebrates the passion that this one-time video-store clerk and unabashed movie fan has for them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So much of Django Unchained indulges Tarantino’s geek-like knowledge of cinema history. The film is a loose reworking of an ultra-violent 1960s spaghetti western named Django (though the slavery element is new). There are endless references to other vintage westerns, as well as a 1970s blaxploitation-slavery mash-up, Mandingo. The star of the original Django, the Italian actor Franco Nero, has a sly cameo, while a host of old B-movie stars pop up throughout.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Django Unchained is deep in blood and high in body count. It begins in Texas with Django, freshly sold, an untamed afro on his head and “r” for runaway branded on his cheek, in chains and being taken to his new plantation. Up rides Schultz (Waltz in a volte-face from his turn as a slimy Nazi officer in Tarantino’s last outing, Inglourious Basterds) in his dentist’s wagon, a large fake tooth attached to a bouncy spring on top. A man of Old-World bearing and easy charm, Schultz never uses one word where five will do, and his eloquent loquaciousness stupefies most of the rednecks he and Django come across. If this movie is fairly scrupulous in the presentation of its black characters, it has no compunction in indulging in stereotypes when it comes to the white ones.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Schultz needs Django’s help in identifying the murderous Brittle brothers, and so, after quickly dispatching the men transporting Django and then freeing him, he proposes a deal. Django agrees to become Schultz’s partner in bounty hunting, and once they have accumulated sufficient funds Schultz will help Django find Broomhilda. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>So begins the righteous retribution. Django, unsurprisingly, turns out to be an expert marksman, and much is made of the fact that a black man gets to kill white men for money. Of course, “black” isn’t the term most used to describe Django and the other characters of African descent. That word (you know it) is uttered liberally throughout the film. This is not new for Tarantino, and is one reason some people do not like his movies. The irony is that here the use of the word is potentially at its most subversive ever in a Tarantino film.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Django—now sharply coiffed and dressed in cowboy-chic threads—and Schultz make their way across the antebellum South in gleefully violent style. Some of the violence is not just intense, but genuinely, audaciously shocking: when have you ever seen a black man whip a white man (in slow motion), or a posse of proto-Ku Klux Klan riders blown to smithereens, or a close-up shot of a white man’s blood staining the fluffy ripe bolls of a cotton plant? These moments often follow laugh-out-loud funny ones; Tarantino’s almost offhanded knack for successfully juxtaposing humour and violence remains impressive.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The pair come at last to Mississippi, where Broomhilda has been sold to a large plantation, Candieland, owned by the sadistic and affected Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). A cigarette holder at his lips, DiCaprio plays his character with unctuous, sister-kissing relish; it’s the best thing he’s done in ages. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>But that’s nothing compared with Stephen, Candieland’s head house slave and chief Uncle Tom, incarnated by a diabolically malevolent Samuel Jackson. Grey-haired, with a piercing stare, and a wizened stoop and body tremble that only enhance his chilling demeanour, Stephen is a shrewdly judged blend of insolence and obsequiousness. He utters more profanities than anyone else, and could be an ancestor of Jules, Jackson’s Jheri-curled enforcer from Pulp Fiction.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Pretending to be involved in one of Candie’s interests—the brutal so-called sport of Mandingo fighting, where slaves fight each other to the death in hand-to-hand combat—Django and Schultz insinuate themselves into Candieland. There follows a masterfully executed dinner-table sequence, full of excruciating tension, as Stephen works out the ruse while Candie makes a humiliating spectacle of Broomhilda’s whip scars and then expounds his racist theory of phrenology.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Once the game is up, however, out come the guns again and from here on in, no white life is spared—none. Django’s transformation from seething slave to punishing avenger is grimly complete. Yet, as the main character, and not merely the sidekick to a white lead, Django is curiously inert. Yes, he becomes a man of physical action, but Foxx never fully stamps his presence on the film in the way Waltz, DiCaprio and Jackson do. Django, in a way, remains chained.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>And whatever you think of the film’s revisionist racial politics, the gender ones remain squarely fossilised. The women in Django Unchained are almost unnecessary. All Kerry Washington does is be victimised, or look alluring, as required; she shows no resourcefulness and plays no part in her own rescue. Broomhilda and Django don’t even have sex, though there are undeniable homoerotic undertones to the film.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Django Unchained is not a deep and considered rumination on slavery and its horrors. It is entertainment—and with its fine performances, eye-popping visual style, quotable dialogue, rich production design and potently eclectic soundtrack featuring 2Pac, Johnny Cash and Beethoven’s Für Elise, it is entertainment of a high order. But it has stirred up more discussion (in the US) about slavery and acceptable portrayals of it than anything in recent times. (Spike Lee, America’s most visible black filmmaker, absented himself from the conversation when he declared rather ostentatiously that he wouldn’t see the film.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here the reactions so far have been, as in the States, quite mixed. As too are the audiences. I have seen the film twice now, and at both screenings the crowds were decidedly multi-ethnic, and given to much laughter and cheering, and, at the end, applause.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Django Unchained<br />
Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino<br />
Starring Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel Jackson<br />
165 mins<br />
USA, 2012</strong></p>
</div></div></div>Sat, 12 Jan 2013 23:57:51 +0000Black_Jacobin58022 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttJonathan AliThe joy of sex, and lovehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/book-club/2012-12-22/joy-sex-and-love
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/bed.png" width="400" height="243" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p>
<div>
“All you need is love,” the Beatles told us (and then added, in case it wasn’t clear, “Love is all you need”). Sage advice, but what if you couldn’t get love, through no fault of your own? The Sessions, written and directed by Ben Lewin and based on actual events, tells the story of someone denied the pleasures of romantic love all his life and what he decided to do about it. It’s a wonderfully funny, moving and unlikely comedy-drama, and one of the best films of the year.</div>
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</div>
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This is the kind of movie that people who appreciate not having their intelligence looked down upon long for, but don’t get often enough. It has complex, three-dimensional characters you care about, and whom you think of long after leaving the cinema. There are no attempts to employ cheap tactics in the name of comedy, or to manipulate the audience for the sake of easy sentimentality. This is a movie that earns its eventual tears.</div>
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</div>
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The Sessions is inspired by the true story of Mark O’Brien, played by John Hawkes. As a boy Mark was struck by a severe case of polio, which left him paralysed from the neck down and in need of an iron lung to help him breathe. His mind remained intact, however, and he eventually graduated from university, attending classes on a gurney and with the help of a respirator.</div>
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It is now 1988 and Mark lives in California, where he is a freelance journalist and a poet. He spends most of his day in the bedroom of his house in the iron lung, which looks like a miniature submarine, his head poking turtle-like out of one end, using a stick gripped between his teeth to tap out words on his typewriter. He has a succession of caregivers who see after all of his physical needs, from giving him a bath to answering the phone.</div>
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</div>
<div>
One of these caregivers is the lovely Amanda (Annika Marks), with whom Mark falls in love. When he reveals his feelings she turns him down and leaves. Sadly this is how it has always been, for Mark, at 38, has never had a girlfriend and is still a virgin. Luckily, or unluckily, he is able to achieve an erection. He yearns not just for love, but what most heterosexual males want and take for granted: the ability to have sex with a woman.</div>
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Mark receives an assignment from a local newspaper to write an article about the sex lives of the physically handicapped. In the process, which involves him conducting a series of comic interviews, he discovers the remarkable existence of “sex surrogates”—people who help others who have trouble with physical intimacy by having sex with them. He decides to avail himself of this service. </div>
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However, as a believer in God (after all, he wryly observes, he must have someone he can blame his predicament on) and a Roman Catholic, he feels he must get official sanction from the church.</div>
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He goes to see Fr Brendan (William H Macy, on fine form), the sort of liberal-minded priest who thinks he’s cooler than he actually is but is likeable nonetheless. Fr Brendan hears Mark’s pre-deed confession. “My penis speaks to me,” Mark tells him.</div>
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The goodly priest, who reasons with his heart more than he does through the inflexible prism of dogma, gives him the okay.</div>
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His free pass from the big guy upstairs in hand, Mark engages the services of a sex surrogate named Cheryl Cohen-Green. Played with sublime candour by Helen Hunt, Cheryl is all blonde-haired radiance and gentle-but-firm understanding. She lays down the rules up front: though she has sex for money she’s not a prostitute (“A prostitute wants your return business. I don’t”), and there is a maximum number of sessions, six, with any one client. Cheryl’s husband Josh (Adam Arkin), clearly a highly evolved human being, calls her a saint.</div>
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The scenes involving the sessions are some of the more honest and titillation-free depictions of sex you’re likely to see on screen. (They’re also wickedly funny—the cunnilingus scene is particularly hilarious.) Mark’s gradual overcoming of his anxiety and guilt and embracing of his sexuality is a joy to behold. And there’s also the pleasurable shock of seeing something you never</div>
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witness in a Hollywood movie: the celebration of a middle-aged woman’s naked body. Hunt’s performance is as brave as it is accomplished.</div>
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</div>
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Predictably, Mark begins to engage in what the experts call transference, and finding in Cheryl an all-purpose lover/mother/friend, falls desperately in love. What comes as a surprise, however, is that Cheryl begins to develop feelings for Mark, too. Thankfully the film steers clear of any contrived and schmaltzy resolution. The sessions end abruptly, and Mark and Cheryl part ways.</div>
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“Love is a journey,” Fr Brendan tells Mark by way of consolation, and so it proves. What happens next is as beautiful and life-affirming as it is heartbreaking.</div>
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</div>
<div>
Ben Lewin, himself a polio survivor, creates in his protagonist a character of satisfying complexity. Mark is an engagingly contradictory and human jumble of thoughts, feelings and desires. And the message that Lewin is slyly able to get across—sex is good—is more subversive than it might first appear. (Disclosure: I had the pleasure of introducing a screening of The Sessions alongside Lewin at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.)</div>
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Relative newcomer Hawkes, who isn’t handicapped, and who spends almost the entire movie lying on his back, is thoroughly convincing in his role. He swings brilliantly from guffaw-inducing self-deprecation to poignant self-pity and back again, with essentially the gestures of his face alone. He taps brilliantly into the essence of his character, so that while you never forget that Mark is handicapped, you’re not constantly hit over the head with the fact, either. It’s a performance to remember.</div>
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</div>
<div>
<strong>The Sessions</strong> is inspired by the true story of Mark O’Brien, played by John Hawkes. As a boy Mark was struck by a severe case of polio, which left him paralysed from the neck down and in need of an iron lung to help him breathe. His mind remained intact, however, and he eventually graduated from university, attending classes on a gurney and with the help of a respirator.</div>
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</div></div></div>Sun, 23 Dec 2012 02:13:13 +0000Black_Jacobin56483 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttJonathan AliRock ’n’ roll with good pedigreehttp://www2.guardian.co.tt/arts/2012-12-08/rock-%E2%80%99n%E2%80%99-roll-good-pedigree
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="http://www2.guardian.co.tt/sites/default/files/field/image/jot.png" width="400" height="560" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p>
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“I don’t need your sympathy, ’cause I’m pushing 50,” declares Gary Hector, the singer and songwriter of jointpop, on Sweet Nothings, the first song and lead single on the rock and roll band’s impressive and hugely enjoyable new album, The Pot Hounds. Hector’s bracing confession serves to underscore his musical longevity: he’s a decades-long survivor of T&amp;T’s rock scene, which on a good night can pack out a small club, and on a bad one doesn’t exist.</div>
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The Pot Hounds, jointpop’s fifth full-length release, finds the formidable quintet—Hector and co-founding lead guitarist Damon Homer, plus bass man Jerome Girdharrie, drummer Dion Camacho and soca refugee Phil Hill on the keyboards—continuing to mine the vintage-rock vein of their two excellent previous efforts, The Longest Kiss Goodnight and The January Transfer Window. </div>
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Specifically, the album is redolent of the 70s, though, thankfully, in the best sense: much more Bowie than Boston. (Anyone still hoping the band would have caught a vaps and returned to the calypso-rock hybridity of their 1996 debut, Port-of-Spain Style, back in the days when Andre Tanker jammed with them live and David Rudder showed up at their gigs, can stop reading now.)</div>
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Yet what is conspicuously absent here is the amps-up-to-11 noise-fest you’d expect from a regular rock and roll album. The exciting, punkish piss and vinegar of Treat Me like the Dog I Am—which could be about the inability to quit an abusive relationship as much as Hector and his band’s refusal to walk away from a thankless career—and the driving Dream Hard aside, The Pot Hounds works its subtle magic through compelling slow jams and mid-tempo workouts.</div>
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Sweet Nothings is a poignant pop gem built around a melody to die for. “Everything you’ve got they want,” Hector sings, his husky croon dripping with anguish and regret, “even if it’s nothing.” Paper Plane is a ballad to melt the hardest of hearts, the beautifully interwoven guitar and piano licks underpinning a promise to construct the titular flying vehicle “with just two seats, my love.” </div>
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Meanwhile the yearning and earnest Don’t Let It Slip is serious rock-and-roll-rent-a-tile business, the gorgeous acoustic riff and sublime keyboard flourishes of the intro and verses holding little hint of the rousing, electrifying bridge to come. “This is all I have, this is all I want” is the naked and unapologetic refrain. It’s the greatest moment on an album full of great moments.</div>
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Shifting gears, Dead Frog Perfume, jokey name aside, is a darkly majestic take on the murder ballad, its mysterious tale of illicit love drenched in Hill’s funereal organ and building to a frantic, genuinely thrilling climax. And Hill again shows off his impressive chops on the funky Superapple, the catchy piano grooves overlaying Camacho and Girdharrie’s taut, head-nodding rhythm, before giving way to Homer’s triumphant guitar solo.</div>
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This leads to the album’s handful of questionable notes. The anthem-like Let’s Pray (for Rock and Roll) and the tender The Water Supreme are fine songs, but they’re not new, having first appeared quite a few years ago on the jointpop EP. What they’re doing here, almost faithfully re-recorded, is a bit of a head-scratcher.</div>
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The inclusion of Let’s Pray—the band’s signature song, if they can be said to have one—is particularly puzzling, though there is an appealing frisson in hearing Hector intone anew the now sadly prophetic line “Let’s pray they don’t massacre the King of Pop.”</div>
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That said, anyone fortunate enough to be encountering jointpop for the first time through this album won’t much care about them recycling old tunes. What it will take to win over new fans, however, when local radio continues to virtually ignore the band’s existence and rock and roll remains pigeonholed here as white-people music remains anyone’s guess.</div>
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One thing is for certain: with the calendar at its end, The Pot Hounds is no less than the best T&amp;T music made all year, and jointpop as brilliant a band as they’ve ever been. Treat them like dogs at your peril.</div>
</div></div></div>Sun, 09 Dec 2012 02:29:38 +0000Black_Jacobin55462 at http://www2.guardian.co.ttJonathan Ali